Janine R. Wedel is Professor of International Commerce and Policy in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. Dr. Wedel writes about governance, corruption, development, and foreign policy through the unique lens of a social anthropologist. As a fellow at the New America Foundation, Dr. Wedel completed Shadow Elite: How the World's Next Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market, to be published by Basic Books in December 2009. In the book, she explores how governments and administrations come and go, but a new breed of power brokers always seem to pop up just where the action is. These players make public decisions without public input--in realms from domestic to foreign and financial policy--and take us into a democracy and accountability-challenged era. Wedel's previous Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Nation, The National Interest, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Times, Salon, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Boston Globe. A four-time Fulbright Fellow, she has also won awards from the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the German Marshall Fund, and the United States Institute of Peace. She has appeared on the BBC, CNN, PBS's Frontline, and National Public Radio, and was an associate producer of three PBS documentaries.

As a Senior Research Fellow with the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, Dr. Wedel directs the Outsourcing National Security Initiative, funded in part by the Ford Foundation. The initiative examines the outsourcing of U.S. national security policy and explores the implications for the government's capacity to act in the national and public interest.

For more on Dr. Wedel's work, please see her personal website: http://janinewedel.info